Collision Is The Master's Method

And a Breton Fairy Tale

Seanchai, Irish storyteller, 1920’s.

I am turning my mind inside out and back to front thinking about Gawain & The Green Knight. By the time you read this I will have been at Foyles bookshop with the Backlisted podcast. I have been sniffing around translations (I’ll be talking about Tolkien's, and will post here when released) and listening to some radically different tellings I’ve given over the last two years. I’ve bashed around with it in Canada and Ireland and England and it still feels utterly fresh.

And lo, it came to pass: John Mitchinson, Laura Varnam, myself, Andy Miller

But today, it’s the Green Knight that’s suddenly wrestled me off my horse. With no conscious thought whatsoever I found myself scrawling in my notes:

Shamanically Christian

Collision is the Master’s Method

Me and some friends gather on a Wednesday night and walk the gauntlet of daring to read the gospels out loud. It’s a furtive, risky experience; it dares pain, discomfort, and great rushes of emotion. It doesn’t have the florid seductions of many myths I love, it’s – as a man said to me last week – bloodied rags of language. It’s some stark material, right there. It’s not rolling out a red carper to make us feel groovy. It’s the good news that arrives with dismay.

Somewhere in John, as things start to get heavy and Yeshua has switched from pithy Galilee stories to big, mad Jerusalem statements about just who he really is, he or John or the Holy Spirit as editor basically say: you can’t handle the light I offer because it makes you feel so exposed.

I haven’t been able to breathe right since.

That’s exactly it. And the exposure is how I-become-a-child-again, which is sort of the game. No distance left to run. That has the wallop of personal truth in it to me. It’s the exposure that does for me. As a fellow of the moonlight, this desert walk of sunlight can leave me awfully wobbly.

Today the Green Knight is doing something a bit like Christ. He offers his life and then returns from death. Us-as-Gawain he invites to do something similar. Scares the shit out of us. In all his compassion and gentle-Jesusing I had forgotten the acute and perfect collisions Yeshua engenders when he needs to push the story along a little. He’s in no way whatsoever afraid of seeming disagreeable in service to truth.

Shamanically Christian. I will never be able to stretch that on the rack enough for it to quite ‘make sense’. If you know you know. It’s not to do with dream catchers or tarot cards or visionary vegetables or ‘Christianity-with-water’ as C.S. Lewis put it. It’s the Christianity that bursts through the castle door one winter’s night and beckons us outside: untamed, playful, terrible, wonderful, and most of all, mysterious. Not a mystery of smoke and mirrors but a mystery of a sky freighted with a billion stars, the mystery that makes our curls singe and twist, and gets a Pentecost energy happening on our tired and boozy tongues.

I can go on about translations and regional dialect in Gawain for a bit, but this is what I really have to say.

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The Princess of the Shining Star - A Breton Fairy Tale

This recording has many bumps and missteps but it’s real, and I found that this Breton fairy tale took me places I didn’t expect. The further we go the more I get pulled in. The next steps will be I tell it here and there around the taverns and backrooms of Dartmoor, to see what it has to gossip, before working it up into a more bespoke shape.